The Oo Kingdom News ArchiveNovember 2003

Sunday, November 2, 2003

I am currently converting the entire site to HTML 4.01 Strict.
This means I will no longer qualify for the X-Philes. It has
been a fun and interesting but frustrating journey.

Being a stickler for doing things “by the book,” I have been
using the ?xml prologue in addition to serving
application/xhtml+xml to better browsers. Everything
was fine until I decided that I should also use the
?xml-stylesheet processing instructions
along with the style and link elements.
Every browser I checked handled it fine until I got to IE6/Windows, which tried
to render the page as generic XML. I was able to verify
this by saving a copy of the source code on my hard drive with a
.xml file extension.

Internet Explorer cannot render XHTML properly
when served according to the W3C spec; its XML
rendering mode left the page a terrible mess, with all of the links
broken and the page useless (see screenshots on another page).

A lot of reading and research went into this. I realized that my
reasons for converting to XHTML served
“correctly” didn't hold water:

Forward compatibility — I think HTML
will be around for a long time, especially considering the number of
tag soup pages out there today.

Giving the best browsers what they want — that means
giving invalid HTML to everyone else, since that’s
how they parse it.

No more! I’m with
Mark
Pilgrim on this one: it’s dangerous.
I’m with Hixie: it’s
considered harmful and can possibly mislead less experienced authors.
Don’t get me wrong: XHTML offers some
great scripting possibilities, not to mention the extensibility
of XML for those who need it (like Jacques
Distler, who blends two namespaces). But until it’s
well supported by the vast majority of the browsing public, I’m
sticking with HTML 4.01 Strict.

Hold yesterday’s hasty post! I discovered partway through
the conversion from XHTML back to
HTML that I was now
getting horizontal scrollbars in Internet Explorer (curse Microsoft!).
Previously I had thought that one of my scripts was fixing the problem;
apparently I was wrong. Internet Explorer’s “standards-compliant
mode” is what was causing the scrollbars. The ?xml
prologue throws Explorer into quirks mode, and voila! no more
scrollbars.

Both the ?xml prologue and the ?xml-stylesheetPIs are optional. If I
use the former but not the latter, and serve MIME
types according to the browser in use, everything should be okay.

This site is already back in full XHTML; the craft
site will follow later on Monday.

Wednesday, November 5, 2003

Our younger kitten, now nearly three-and-a-half months old,
has learned to climb over the boxes Joe put up to keep him out of
his bedroom. Joe has removed the boxes, giving both kittens free
admission to his room.

We took Sunny to the vet this morning
at 8:30 local time. He was quite calm in the car on the way there,
but he hissed the moment we got inside. Then he began growling!
After a bit, he settled down. His temp was normal; his weight is up
sharply, at 1.86 kg (4 lbs. 1.5 oz.).
He received a distemper shot today; they also gave us some stuff
to help with hairballs, and a little catnip for the road.

The weather has been unpleasant lately—cloudy, rainy and
somewhat breezy at times since Halloween night. Tomorrow should be
sunny but breezy and cooler.

The crafts site
is up and running in XHTML 1.0 Strict;
there is even styling for Netscape 4.

You may notice that the .html extensions no longer
appear in our URIs.
Some mod_rewrite magic allowed us to take care of that.
An article entitled
Clean
url’s by Thijs van der Vossen tells
how to do it. Thanks to Anne
van Kesteren, whose link led me to the article.

It is a fairly simple matter to produce a Web page that passes
all of the automated accessibility tests performed by such services
as Bobby
and Cynthia
Says. In all fairness to them, no automated service can
possibly address all of the issues that concern Web content
accessibility, and both of them do a good job of addressing what they
can. But to ensure that a Web page is truly accessible, one must
read the fine print—check out the specification and see if
everything on the page actually measures up.

After going to great lengths (or so I thought) to ensure that our
pages are fully accessible to all users regardless of what devices
they use to browse the Internet, I received this disturbing
email (see Follow-up)
from none other than the Web Team of Section508.com:

These web pages do not yet meet the requirements for Section 508 Approved status.
To be Section 508 Approved, a page must pass all of the accessibility
checkpoints established in Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act.

The email then proceeded to enumerate several of the most frequent
errors—the ones that I always check for myself, and these
pages pass.

Confused, I replied to the email and asked the team to be more
specific and tell me exactly what they found on this page that was
non-compliant.

I used the “Section 508” link at the bottom of this page to
check it at Cynthia Says. Yeah, it passed automated verification.
Now let’s check the fine print! I came up with a few things
which may be non-compliant:

I have used CSS
to color-code all external links on this site. The specification
says that if color is used to convey information, that information
must also be conveyed another way. Oops. My class="ext"
is not really semantic at all!

The script I use to make the q, abbr
and acronym work on Internet Explorer, can occasionally
cause the screen to flicker. This may be in violation of a rule
that states that “Pages shall be designed to avoid causing the
screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than
55 Hz.” Or not? It flickers once, if at all—not enough to
establish a frequency. Violation, or no?

Our email link has “javascript…” as a target.
See next point.

There is a script element in the document
head; its functions are to bring in the script mentioned
above for Internet Explorer; to bring in a limited style sheet for
Netscape 4; and to define the function for the email link. There is
no noscript element on the page to provide alternate
content, but the site is fully functional without the IE script and the limited
style sheet, and the email address is still available
without a clickable link. Violation, or no?

“A method shall be provided that permits users to skip
repetitive navigation links.” Well, I have a link to skip
to the navigation, but no link to skip over it.
Only the footer appears after the navigation in the page source.
Should I provide an extra skip link, or change the page structure?

As you can see, the best way of doing things is not always clear.
I will wait to see what the Section508.com people have to say about
this site and then go from there. I’ll keep you informed.
For now, be skeptical of pages that sport the “AAA Approved”
logo (which I have removed from this page). The W3C Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines are a lot tougher—I wonder if anyone can
actually satisfy them all.

I received a follow-up email reply at 03:53 UTC
Wednesday morning. It read as follows: “Sorry for the mistake,
we still trying to get the bugs out of systems” (sic) (Sounds like
the problems I’ve been having with this site.) Okay! Nevertheless
I will consider the possible violations I mentioned above, and as
always, I will keep you posted.

Just finished cleaning up the URIs on
Ummamum’s Picture
Place at 06:14 UTC. Also switched the DOCTYPE
to XHTML
1.0 Strict, to match the rest of the site.

Thursday, November 6, 200321:15 UTC

From point
(c) of the Section 508 guidelines, it seems that our color-coded
external links are okay. The fact that a link is external is usually
apparent from the context; the color only makes them easier to spot
on the page (which is helpful to me, since I have to keep them
updated). Also, the colored shading is visibly darker than the page
background, so it will show up okay in black and white.
Presentation themes
have been added since this was first posted, and in some themes,
the external links are highlighted in a lighter color than
the surrounding text.

The single screen flicker occasionally caused by our special
script for Internet Explorer, should pose no problem since it’s
no different from someone blinking his eyes, or a light flickering
briefly when turned on. Repetitive or consistent flickering (as
seen in the popular ad that says “If this screen is flashing,
you are a winner”) is the real problem as it becomes annoying
to users and can potentially trigger epileptic seizures.

The javascript email links do the same thing they always have:
they provide a clickable hyperlink to accompany the email address,
which is available in both the image and its alternate text (the
alt attribute) regardless of whether the script works
or not. In this case, the alternative content is built in.

The script element in the document head
does not provide content; it merely improves what is already there.
If scripting is disabled, Netscape 4 gets unstyled markup, which is
okay; Internet Explorer gets no quotation marks, but quoted text is
italicized via the style sheet; the email link is broken but the
address is still there. All is well in the Oo Kingdom.

As for the “skip navigation” link, that should be provided
if the navigation precedes the content in the page source.
This is so users of screen readers (such as the visually impaired)
don’t have to listen to the navigation before hearing the
page’s real content. On our pages, the navigation falls
after the content, so this should not be a problem (only
the footer appears after the navigation, and it’s mostly
more links anyway). I have provided a “Jump to navigation” link
on each page, right after the main heading, to speed exit in case
this wasn’t the page the user wanted. I believe anything more
than that would be needless clutter.

You hear about “the King’s English” all the time, but
what about “the King’s HTML”? I did a Google
search on "king's
html" and came up with 77 pages. Most of the results were
stuff like “Eastons Bible Dictionary - Dale, the king's -
HTML Bible” where the two words just happened to be juxtaposed
in the title line. Many others pertained to HTML
authoring tools, usually built by someone named King. A few pages
were actual HTML tutorials; some of them were downright
antiquated.

Next I tried a Google search for "king's xhtml" and got
no results at all, so I decided I would be the first
one to get a listing for that category. You will find “the
King’s XHTML” included in the title bar on
our Home page. New logos may follow in the near future.

One external link did appear on the search results page, however.
It was an advertisement for XStandard, an XHTML 1.1
WYSIWYG editor.
The ad contained a link to a conversation
with Vlad Alexander, VP of
Development at Belus Technology, who made a strong case for using
XHTML 1.1 as opposed to HTML or even earlier versions of XHTML.
But some of the statements he made are dead wrong:

“The font element and the style
attribute are gone, forever.”
The font element is gone, all right, but the
style attribute is only deprecated.
Many people seem to be confused by that term; when an item is
deprecated, it means that although it remains in the
specification, its use is discouraged in favor of newer methods
(in the case of the style attribute, used for
embedding styles in text, the newer methods would be
styleelements in document
heads, or external stylesheets).

“…and data has been separated from
presentation once and for all.” OK then, why do XStandard’s
Web pages use tables for layout? That use was discouraged
by the W3C in the
HTML 4 specification back in 1998. Valid markup never
guarantees separation of data from presentation. Authors need to
ensure this through judicious use of markup and style.

Eric Meyer wrote an excellent article about separation
of data from presentation, entitled The
Incomplete Divorce. In the article he states that

…the divorce is not complete and never can be.
I’ve been saying this in public presentations for a while now,
and it bears repetition here: you can have structure without style,
but you can’t have style without structure… you have to
have elements (and, also, classes and IDs
and such) in order to apply style.

Back to XStandard—I was also disappointed to see a general
lack of semantic markup on the pages; specifically, not one of
cite, dfn, code,
samp, kbd, q, abbr
or acronym. The home page didn’t use em
or strong either, but the conversation page contained
one em element and lots of strongs.

Oh well. At least they are making some effort toward standards
compliance. What about the zillions of tag soup pages out there?

There is a company called CIWCertified.com
that specializes in training people to be Certified Internet
Webmasters (CIW). The training includes instruction
in all areas of Internet technology, not just markup. But by the
look of things, that site’s own management could stand to
learn a few things about markup. All of their pages are laid out
in tables, with no DOCTYPE in the sources. So much for
standards!

Then I found their About
CIW page. At the bottom of the page is a
list of other sites that do IT
training and certification. Looking at the page’s source,
it was probably meant to be an actual list of links, but whoever
put it there forgot to mark anything up at all, so it
appears on the page as a continuous run of company names and
URIs and
not one solitary hyperlink. The page has not been fixed
since I checked it last, in July. I am sure that CIWCertified.com
is a reputable organization, but fixing their broken markup (or lack
of markup) would certainly improve their credibility.

Monday, November 10, 200306:00 UTC

While checking to see how certain websites rendered on some older
browsers yesterday, I discovered a link which led to a blog post
entitled Multiple Versions of
Internet Explorer. You can now actually download
stand-alone versions of some older Internet Explorer browsers for
use in testing websites! (NOTE, November 7, 2007: this is now gone.)

Of course, I downloaded the zip files, unzipped and installed
them, and then proceeded to test this site on them. IE 5.5 rendered this site exactly
the same as IE 6.0, but the site was sadly broken in
IE 5.01. This problem is now fixed, though it took me
hours of troubleshooting with scripts and style sheets as well as
a minor edit of every page source on the primary domain.

Tuesday, November 11, 200306:00 UTC

All quotations in Ummamum’s
Picture Place are now marked up with the q
element (there are no quotes on the crafts site). Abbreviations
and acronyms on all sites are now marked up properly as well.
Improved scripting and styling ensure proper visual presentation
for popular browsers, including Internet Explorer.

Wednesday, November 12, 200304:15 UTC

Today I downloaded IE 3
and 4 from the site mentioned in the November 10 entry, and tested
this site on them. Floating images on many pages messed up the layout
and surrounding text on IE 4. Much of my day was spent
fixing bugs on the site; everything works fine now, including the
quotation marks (which also required more fixing).

Second update (06:35 UTC)

Reversed order of entries on all News Archive pages, so that
the oldest post always appears at the top of the page.

Added styling for the dfn element, used to indicate
the defining instance of a term. These now appear in bold
small-caps as in this example (Netscape 4 doesn’t
support this).

Friday, November 14, 200322:40 UTC

I have been doing a lot of styling and scripting on the site
the past few days. Everything works properly now on every browser
I tested it on. This includes Internet Explorer 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and
6.0 (Windows); Netscape 4.03, 4.77 and 7.1; Mozilla Firebird;
Opera 6.01 and 7.22. Older browsers (Netscape 2.02 and 3.04;
Internet Explorer 3.0) get unstyled content, which is okay.

The new subtitle on the Home page logo will stay until I discover
that it’s too long for Google to list in full (which I suspect
it is). If that happens, I’ll figure out a way to shorten it
a little.

At any rate, this so-called “Web Design Nightmare From
You Know Where” appears to be finally at an end.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Our old subtitle, “Digital Home of Charlie Petitt &
Family,” had to go. “Digital home” is nowadays used to
refer to digital media in the home (as in “digital
home entertainment”). It does not at all describe the content
of this site. So I tried “A Family Site in the King’s
XHTML
by Charlie Petitt” which proved to be too long. Google cuts
off the last word of the title, which just happens to be our last
name!

On Monday evening, I ran several possible titles by Wendi and
Joe to see what they liked. Joe was in favor of keeping the words
“& Family” in the title. What we finally decided upon
(unanimously) was not far from our old title and surprisingly
close to the one used on Ummamum’s Hideout Gold
Version 2 (July 18, 2000; see our history
page). The new title describes the site well and should last
us a very long time.

The image on the Home page bearing the words “May God Bless Our
Digital Home” has also been retired after nearly three years
of running on our site. I believe God has blessed our
site, but it is not a “digital home.” In place of
the image is a “No-Evil Family-Site Award” linked to
the site from which it came. This award emphasizes the wholesome,
child-safe, Grandma-safe content which has been a tradition on
The Oo Kingdom.

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Joe has been home from school sick since
midday Friday. His regular doctor diagnosed him with bronchitis
then and prescribed Amoxicillin for him. Four days later, he was
no better—actually worse. Now he was weak and dizzy and
coughing up yucky stuff.

We made another trip to the clinic and saw another doctor.
This time they even did chest X-rays. We went back to the exam
room and waited. Finally the doctor returned with the X-rays.

“You have a nice pneumonia,” the doctor announced, almost
cheerfully. He showed us the X-rays, and we knew that he was not
kidding. Joe’s lungs were filled with white specks and all
sorts of cloudy stuff. No wonder he felt ill!

The doctor prescribed a new medication called Zithromax which
hopefully will clear it up. Joe is excused from school on Wednesday,
and there are no classes on Thursday or Friday this week due to
parent-teacher conferences.

Thursday, November 20, 2003

We have switched our Web hosting company from Jatol.com to
DoorHost.net. This will make no difference in how the site appears
to visitors. I only changed the text font so I know when the
DNS changes take effect
in our area. The font change will be temporary unless we decide
that we like this better.
I have already changed
it back.

Sunday, November 23, 2003

Another edit of all pages on the primary domain took most
of the day on Friday. This edit made the navigation bar improvements
possible and simplified alternate styling for selected browsers.

Today at 05:04 UTC I gave the best browsers (Mozilla,
Netscape 7, Opera 7) a fixed-position navigation bar. What this means
is that the page content can scroll while the navigation bar stays
put. Longer navigation bars will have separate scrollbars of their
own.

Less capable browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera 6) will get the
navigation bar absolute-positioned on the page, as before
(Netscape 4 users will find it at the bottom of the page).

My sincere apology goes out to anyone who tried in vain to visit
the pictures or crafts sites the past three days. I transferred the
files to the new server but forgot to create the subdomains. The
problem is now corrected, and all is well in the Oo Kingdom.

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Joe stayed home from school Monday and Tuesday with a lingering
cough. At today’s follow-up visit to the doctor, X-rays showed
the pneumonia was gone. He
should be recovered well enough to return to school next Monday,
after the Thanksgiving break.

The five of us (Charlie, Wendi, Joe, Shadow and Sunny) wish you
a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday—even if
you aren’t from the United States.

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Most visitors can now choose between four presentation themes
for this site. The options appear at the bottom of the navigation
bar, only on the Home page so far. JavaScript and cookies are
required; the cookie is only used to store your choice of theme.

If you are using Internet Explorer or Netscape version 4, you
will not be able to change the theme yet. I am still working on it.

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Presentation themes are now working properly on all modern
browsers plus Internet Explorer 4. Netscape 4 browsers crash on the
styles and scripting, so I have blocked this feature from those
browsers (they will receive only the default Pastels theme).

Removed margins from text boxes and block quotes; this fixed
a bug in Netscape 4 and improved rendering for everyone else.
Also improved the Kittens background image (by the way, the kittens
are Shadow and Sunny, if you haven’t already guessed).

This evening, I added the Presentation Themes menu to the bottom
of all navigation bars (it won’t appear on Netscape 4 or older
browsers). This meant editing every page again in Windows WordPad.
Somehow I accomplished this in 74 minutes flat, even with 270 pages!

By the way, our Thanksgiving was great. We spent much of the day
with some friends here in Janesville; we brought homemade sweet
potato and apple pies, and deviled eggs; they supplied the rest.
Boy, was there a feast!